I did not know why
by XanderSalamanda
Summary: Time slows down every time I am in danger. The more serious the danger is, the more time I have to save myself. During one terrible car accident, I had almost a minute to react. And now, time has almost completely stopped for a whole month, and I don't know why.


I was alive.

Glass reflected the sunlight of a burning summer's day on the highway. I still smelled smoke and tasted blood as the paramedics pressed instrument after instrument to my body. According to them, I had been thrown out the windshield during the collision. In truth, I'd walked out. I'd hit the unlock button, opened the door, and let my feet touch the pavement. I hadn't thought about it, I just did it, as if moving on autopilot. And that's when time started again.

I didn't come out of it unscathed. That wasn't how this worked. The cars slamming into each other still threw glass and debris everywhere, and I could feel blood leaking through my clothes from small pieces of glass that had embedded themselves into my legs and arms. But they were nonlethal, that's how it always went, when time stopped and I could see my future stretching ahead of me like a string disappearing into the abyss.

_Minor lacerations. Minimal blood loss. No sign of bruising. You're lucky to be alive._ The words sailed over my head as I stared at the wreckage ahead of me. The truth was, my power didn't work for anyone else but me. I could see death's grin reflecting in the eyes of the other driver and there was nothing I could do about it. I couldn't alter the course of time, I couldn't alter others' lives, only my own. And as I sat there, tasting blood and smoke, I slowly put my head in my hands and let out a shuddering gasp.

There had been a body thrown through the windshield upon collision. They hadn't been wrong about that.

"I just stepped out," I repeated to myself as I rocked back and forth under the blanket they put around my shoulders. "I didn't have a choice. It didn't let me."

_You're lucky to be alive._

Was I?

Everyone had an expiration date. There was no changing it, no knowing it. My thread could never intersect with others'. Had I been able to, I would have turned around and grabbed my three year old son before I stepped out of the car a moment before the collision, but now they were cleaning his remains off the pavement.

I couldn't pinpoint exactly when time stopped. My waking moments were spent with aching, bleary eyes and disappearances into the darkness of sleep.

It could have been days. It could have been weeks. Time had no meaning to me, at least until my stomach told me I had to eat. I slowly slipped out of my bed, smelling the sour dampness of the sheets that had been soaked from sweat from the night terrors, and faced the world. The world was only the kitchen, but it still felt insurmountable as I stood at the threshold between my bedroom and the kitchen and stared with swollen eyes at the empty apartment.

My wife had left almost immediately after the news. I couldn't blame her. And I couldn't tell her the truth, no matter how much I wanted to. I couldn't put that burden on her to know that I'd survived through some unknown, unexpected force and our son hadn't.

The clock wasn't moving, though. That meant time had stopped.

I ran my sleeve over my face and stared blankly at it, as if it might start moving again. Time only stopped when critical danger was nearby. So what did this mean? Was there a burglar outside the door? Was an airplane about to crash into the building?

Could I somehow convince time to start and let it happen?

But that wasn't how it worked. I slowly moved around the apartment, looking in each room and finding nothing out of the ordinary, just my wife's possessions laying on the floor where they'd fallen out of her half open luggage. She's gone to her mother's house. I was partially at fault. I couldn't comfort her. I couldn't do anything but exist, and even that was too much for me. She needed support, and I couldn't give it.

I stepped over her strewn about panties and blouses and headed toward the front door. Outside, there was nothing. The grass was too high, like the apartment manager forgot to cut it, my wife's car was missing from the spot directly in front of the apartment complex's entrance (we'd laughed once about how convenient that parking spot was. Mine was around the building.), and everything seemed so painfully normal. No explosions in mid detonation. No SWAT preparing to break down the door. Nothing but boring, perfect normalcy of a midwestern suburb.

Maybe time had finally broken. Maybe I was broken. Maybe my desire to cease existing has caught up with this unexplained superpower, and now I lived in some purgatory where I could exist forever and watch the world never pass me by.

Yet, I knew in truth this meant my death was coming, and I embraced it. I searched for it. Maybe I could diffuse the situation briefly, let time catch up, then put myself in danger again. Over and over. Over and over until time ceased stopping. There had to be a limit to this super power, wasn't there? Some maximum number of times before the magic faded?

As the days drifted by, I found myself falling deeper and deeper into a loneliness that eclipsed my entire being. I was surrounded by people, but completely alone. There was nothing but silence, nothing but me. No matter how much I screamed at people to respond to me, no matter how much I cried and begged, no matter how much I struck them (and I'm not proud of that) I was still utterly alone.

I visited my son's grave. The flowers on it were fresh; someone had visited recently, recently enough that the time stop kept them frozen in beautiful fresh health. They were a vibrant purple and yellow.

I asked him questions. I asked if his angel blamed me for not being able to save him. I asked if there was any way I could have stayed in the car. Nothing answered but silence.

By the seventh day, I decided I would go to my wife's mother's house.

The distance meant it took me weeks to get there. At one point, I grabbed a bicycle from Walmart (as vehicles never worked in the time freeze) and cycled there, lost in my thoughts. I never got the answers I was looking for. If time had stopped for this long, it meant I was in extreme danger, greater than any I had ever been in before. Maybe this meant an asteroid would hit. Maybe it meant there was a nuclear bomb in mid flight. If I cycled far enough, would time start again? And yet, even as I thought about this, I cycled with nothing but emptiness in my heart and a sense of yearning.

Time had been stopped for a full month when I reached the house. It was a small place tucked in the back of a culdesac whose road had seen better days, and my bicycle bumped and shook the whole last few minutes down. The old 1950's construction welcomed me as I slowly dismounted my bike. Her mother's car was gone from the driveway, and they never used the garage. I'd only been here three or four times; her mother usually insisted on visiting us, even if we didn't technically have the room.

The stairs didn't creak as I headed up them toward the door. Locked. I contemplated breaking in—but no, I couldn't cause her mother that kind of expense, not when she was barely subsisting on SSI payments. I went around the back and climbed into an open window to find my wife sitting at a desk, a pen in hand, tears streaming down her face. A note was on the desk. Something else was in her hand.

I realized what the true danger was, why time had stopped for so long. I was facing the moment before the news that would cause my own death as I lost the last person that mattered to me. Time would not start until I stopped the danger to myself, and it was right in front of me, an instant from happening.

Her thread had, somehow, intertwined with mine. I could not save our child, but this time, saving her was ultimately saving me.

Time began again


End file.
